This film should have been right up my street. I love prime Capra (this was made only two years after "It's a Wonderful Life") and am a fan of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn both, but this would-be excoriating exposee of American electoral politics certainly doesn't get my vote.
Perhaps my being American doesn't help either. A lot of the rapid-fire dialogue with its references to topical U.S. politics of the time and the functioning of the big party machine by fixers and bosses went over my head for one thing.
Whilst I'm aware that at the time of this movie Tracy and Hepburn's own extra-marital affair was already well-known and long-running, still Tracy appears miscast as the kid-from-nowhere idealistic straight-arrow industrialist put forward by the new kingmaker in Washington circles, Angela Lansbury, with whom he's been having an affair behind the scenes, although you'd hardly know it when they share a scene. Adolphe Menjou too seems too lightweight as the serpent-like back-seat driver Conavan and Van Johnson as the bell-wether press agent gets to mug a lot and not much else.
To my mind Tracy's character takes Lansbury and Menjou's presidential bait too easily before he then too quickly compromises himself to get the delegate votes for the upcoming party convention. Elsewhere there's a pointless extended scene where the would-be President takes the controls of the aircraft flying him to go through a series of aerial stunts presumably to show him as a man of the people.
I also found the supposedly humorous inserts fell flat especially when the old hotel chambermaid takes a shine to Johnson and of course the climactic party scene at the candidate's house where Tracy's to make his big address to the nation and a drunk Hepburn brings him to his senses while the old Capra-corn touch of employing scenes where the ordinary average American citizen punctures the surrounding political hypocrisy this time came across as very obvious, laboured and heavy-handed.
No, this time there was no sense of the warm afterglow I normally experience after watching a good Capra movie. All the huffing and puffing on show here couldn't blow this House of Representatives down.
Perhaps my being American doesn't help either. A lot of the rapid-fire dialogue with its references to topical U.S. politics of the time and the functioning of the big party machine by fixers and bosses went over my head for one thing.
Whilst I'm aware that at the time of this movie Tracy and Hepburn's own extra-marital affair was already well-known and long-running, still Tracy appears miscast as the kid-from-nowhere idealistic straight-arrow industrialist put forward by the new kingmaker in Washington circles, Angela Lansbury, with whom he's been having an affair behind the scenes, although you'd hardly know it when they share a scene. Adolphe Menjou too seems too lightweight as the serpent-like back-seat driver Conavan and Van Johnson as the bell-wether press agent gets to mug a lot and not much else.
To my mind Tracy's character takes Lansbury and Menjou's presidential bait too easily before he then too quickly compromises himself to get the delegate votes for the upcoming party convention. Elsewhere there's a pointless extended scene where the would-be President takes the controls of the aircraft flying him to go through a series of aerial stunts presumably to show him as a man of the people.
I also found the supposedly humorous inserts fell flat especially when the old hotel chambermaid takes a shine to Johnson and of course the climactic party scene at the candidate's house where Tracy's to make his big address to the nation and a drunk Hepburn brings him to his senses while the old Capra-corn touch of employing scenes where the ordinary average American citizen punctures the surrounding political hypocrisy this time came across as very obvious, laboured and heavy-handed.
No, this time there was no sense of the warm afterglow I normally experience after watching a good Capra movie. All the huffing and puffing on show here couldn't blow this House of Representatives down.